Arena? What is the Arena?

[NTJedi]

95% of the time it's best not to send anyone into the death match arena when the game consists of 3 or more opponents. First looking at the odds reveals that only one individual will win and all others will be dying and thus not worth the life of a good commander. Second the prize involves an artifact which will curse your commander to continously return to this event for all future matches. Third in games with human opponents many players will send 'screwers' into the death match which have a main purpose of giving cursed items, horror marks, cursed, blind and so on... thus even if you win, the commander will be screwed.

Ideally the death match should have a prize which would encourage players to send a good commander. The most enticing prize off the top of my head would be random gems equal to the current game turn multiplied by 1.5. Thus game turn_10 would provide 15 random gems and game turn_50 would provide 75 random gems.

The death match could really be a very interesting event if the prize was improved.

[ologm]

You also get +150 experience. Free heroic ability early in the game.

[thejeff]

One idea I had was to improve the prize if the current Champion successfully defended it.

[NTJedi]

ologm said:
You also get +150 experience. Free heroic ability early in the game.

As I wrote earlier... even if your commander is lucky enough to win he will most likely be cursed, horror marks, cursed items, blind or something else when playing against human players... thus not that useful! If you're talking super early in the game then it's still usually not worth sending someone if there's lots of human players. Lets not forget the prize will curse the winner to return to all future death matches as well.
And if you're playing a SP game then unless you have less than 4 computer opponents your chances of winning are very slim and thus NOT worth the life of a good commander.

Current prize value is only worth sending someone if it's a small number of opponents.

[Taqwus]

Oh, in SP... the AI doesn't really set up its commanders for duels. There's a much lower need to cover as many resistances as possible or to handle the fatigue of long battles, for instance, and summons or auto-attacking items have vastly more effect proportionally speaking. And targeting is much more obvious...

Early on, if you have a spare skelespammer (ex Dusk Elder), his odds are quite good against AIs. The prize is less valuable for them now that the quickness doesn't accelerate casting, but *shrug*. Ditto for a talisman o' skeleton-spamming.

A mage capable of casting Gifts from Heaven with heroic precision would be highly entertaining.

[Wick]

NTJedi said:Ideally the death match should have a prize which would encourage players to send a good commander. The most enticing prize off the top of my head[/b]

The most enticing prize off the top of my head would be the removal of curses, horror marks, cursed items and/or whatnot. That's a prize worth risking death for, and also eliminates the poison pill schemes.